[Updated to add: Kevin Sonney is drawing a line in the sand for Patreon — he’ll not only walk on 31 Dec if the changes aren’t rolled back, he will use his (and I can speak to this personally) considerable tech skills to help any creators that want to move off Patreon to do so, for free. He may want to get one of those take-a-number things like at the deli counter, but expect others to replicate this offer.]

And everybody really hates the US$0.35/pledge fee, considering Patreon doesn’t charge backers per pledge, but once per total. It’s a naked cash grab. But, it appears, that was the entire point.

What’s really surprised me (apart from the ham-handedness about the entire rollout that I noted yesterday) is that I couldn’t find one person with an interest in Patreon that’s even neutral on this change. I’ve spent all my free time since last night trying to find one person — creator or backer — whose irritation went no higher than meh, whatcha gonna do? But no; literally everybody whose email address doesn’t end in @patreon.com hates everything about this change.

Which leads to a philosophical question — even if Patreon opted to abandon their plans, would anybody trust them again? To my mind, Kickstarter is smart enough to start picking off high-profile Patreon accounts in their invite-only period, giving them time to scale up without being overwhelmed.

Even more important, Kickstarter is fundamentally different from Patreon in a critical fashion: they’re a public benefit corporation; they are required by their charter to engage in a decision process that is not solely governed by how much money they can make.

Argh, what? I got an email from Patreon, but was too busy with Real Life (work deadlines are Hell this time of year) to digest what it said, and now this has blown up, and I’m at work, and busy for the next 20-odd hours and unable to do much about it right now.

&@#*(^$ it never rains but it pours.

Count me in as pissed as hell. I’ll do somethigng about it too, when I get a moment to breathe.

Patreon’s blog had an update explaining more clearly: they actually are going to start charging backers per pledge, not per total!

It’s meant to avoid the customer service problems with people pledging during the month (or worse, at the end) and then getting charged again the first of the following month. Instead, charges will be strictly monthly from the time you first pledge. (Snark: so if I pledge on the 31st of a month, I only get charged 7 times a year?)

I still think it’s a terrible idea as it destroys a major reason Patreon is useful in the first place: bundling together many pledges into one transaction to reduce processing fees.